Things I’ve Learned NOT to Fix

One of the great myths about getting older is that you become wise.  You do not. You simply accumulate a very large collection of opinions based on having already made most of the available mistakes. The problem is that nobody necessarily wants those opinions.

This is particularly difficult when you live with your adult children and their children. I have decades of experience being a mother. I successfully raised a child all the way to adulthood. I kept them alive. I navigated schools, illnesses, teenagers, driving, dating and countless other crises.

You would think this would make me an invaluable household resource.  Apparently not.

One of the things I'm still learning is how to stay on my side of the street.  This is harder than it sounds.

My kidults let the boys do things I would never have considered when I was raising her. Sometimes I watch a parenting decision unfold and every cell in my 74-year-old body wants to stand up and announce:

“I HAVE SOME EXPERIENCE WITH THIS.”

Instead, I am learning to say nothing.

Well, mostly nothing.

For example, I have learned that the precise location of a teenage boy's waistband is not my responsibility.

Apparently pants can now be worn at a latitude that allows the general public to admire a considerable portion of their underwear. I don't understand it. I don't like it. And I have discovered that pulling someone else's pants up is frowned upon.

So I stay on my side of the street.

I have also learned that $50 is apparently a perfectly reasonable amount to spend on face cleanser.

Fifty dollars!

For something whose entire job is to be applied to your face and then immediately washed down the drain. I am from the generation that believed soap had pretty much cracked this problem.

But I don't have to fix it.

Then there is the $170 back to school backpack.

I should clarify. The backpack had previously been purchased by his brother — also used — for $200.

So apparently this wasn't reckless spending at all.

He saved $30.

I am still adjusting to an economy in which a used backpack can circulate among teenage boys for sums of money that I associate with small appliances.

When I was younger, used meant somebody else had owned it first and therefore it should cost less.

Today, we call it vintage.

For $170, I feel the backpack should carry me.

But this morning provided an excellent opportunity to practice my new philosophy.

My grandson is holding a garage sale of his used clothing in our condo clubhouse today. I was under the impression that his father would be there with him.

Apparently I was mistaken.

My first instinct was, naturally, to FIX THIS.

Is he old enough? Is this allowed? Can you actually use the clubhouse to make money? Does an adult have to be present?

So I did what any grandmother attempting to stay out of things would do.

I looked up the Clubhouse Guidelines.

There is no age requirement.  Residents are allowed to hold events where they make money. In other words, there was absolutely nothing for me to fix.

This was extremely disappointing.

So today a 15-year-old is next door conducting commerce while I am in my room trying to stay on my side of the street.

I may need two Tylenol.

And I'm slowly discovering that this lesson extends well beyond teenage boys.

I don't have to fix every disagreement.

I don't have to fix every bad mood.

I don't have to point out every mistake before somebody makes it.

That last one is particularly painful.

Because I KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN.

I've already been down that road. I know where the potholes are. I know there's construction ahead. I know the bridge is out. And yet sometimes the people I love need to drive down the road themselves.

Friends don't always need solutions. Volunteer organizations don't need me to correct every inefficient procedure. Other adults are allowed to make choices I wouldn't make.

This has been quite a revelation.

There was a time when I thought being helpful meant helping. Now I'm beginning to understand that sometimes being helpful means keeping my mouth shut.

I am not always successful.

But I'm getting better.

These days, when I feel the overwhelming urge to straighten out someone else's life, I try to remember one simple rule:

Stay on your side of the street.

There's plenty over here that needs fixing.

They Don’t Want My Cherished Treasures

I have downsized. 

Repeatedly.

At one time I owned seven sets of dishes. Yes, seven. And that doesn't count the two sets of Christmas dishes. Before you call the china police, there was a reason. Ralph and I entertained. A lot.

Our cooking club

We had dinner parties. Holiday dinners. Summer parties, large and small, that spilled out onto the decks and into the yard. We had enough outdoor furniture to seat a small municipality. I set tables with placemats and cloth napkins and flowers and wine glasses. I apparently believed that every meal deserved its own coordinating dishware.

(lower deck)

(upper deck)

   

(off the lower deck to tiny yard)

And I loved it.

One of our sets of Christmas dishes was a wedding gift from Ralph's mother. That sentence alone explains why I still own them. They aren't just plates. They come with a person attached.

Christmas

Make your own sushi party

That's the trouble with getting rid of things when you're older.

Everything comes with somebody attached.

I've already done the serious downsizing. Most of those seven sets of dishes are long gone. What remains is our everyday stuff, the two Christmas sets, and what I still call the good stuff.

Except now I'm living with millennials.

I've been living with my family for ten years, and in all that time I don't think they've ever had people over. For anything, let alone for dinner.

Not once.

This is baffling to a woman who once considered having the right cloth cocktail napkins a basic life skill. To be fair, at this point we couldn’t entertain if we wanted to.

Our dining area contains a full-size freezer because two teenage eating machines live here. Beside the freezer are fishing poles and soccer balls. There is a bicycle. An electric scooter is plugged in somewhere among all of this.

And, as I write this, the bench seat from our 2014 Honda Odyssey is sitting in front of the fireplace.

Martha Stewart does not live here.

Once upon a time, I worried about whether the napkins coordinated with the placemats. Today, I would just be happy if nobody had to move a soccer ball to get to the freezer.

Somewhere in storage my good china is waiting patiently for civilization to return.

But they don't want my good china. They don't want the silver. They don't want the serving pieces. I'm fairly certain that if I left them a handwritten inventory explaining the provenance of every platter and gravy boat, they would use it to locate the nearest Goodwill.

I don't blame them. Well, perhaps three percent of me blames them.

Their lives are different. Entertaining is different. Homes are different. Families are different. Nobody seems terribly interested anymore in owning a special plate that must be hand-washed and carefully returned to a quilted storage case so it can wait eleven months for another appearance.

Come to think of it, that's a fairly ridiculous job description for a plate.

But here's the part I'm struggling with:

I don't necessarily want the things anymore, either. I want what happened around them.

I want the Christmas table with every chair occupied. I want friends arriving through the door. I want Ralph there. I want the summer evening when people wandered from one deck to another with a drink in their hands. I want the anticipation of setting the table before everyone arrived.

And Goodwill, annoyingly, does not have a donation category for that.

So I'm downsizing again.

This time I'm going through the things that survived all the previous purges precisely because they weren't stuff. They were treasures.

Some I'll keep. Some I'll sell. Some I'll give away. And I'll probably pick up each one and tell myself its entire life story before I let it go.

Because apparently that's how I downsize.

One memory at a time.

Condo when Ralph and I lived there

Before They Were Mom and Dad

I’ve been watching The Waltons.

That may be partly responsible for sending me down this particular rabbit hole. Watching that family live through the Depression made me think about my own parents—not as Mom and Dad, but as children growing up in a world I can hardly imagine.  I remember stories about only being allowed to wear shoes to school or church.

My Dad was born in 1921 in Carbon Hill, Ohio, a tiny coal-mining community in Hocking County. His family had come a long way to get there … from Germany before immigrating to America and eventually settling in Ohio.

But genealogy gives you names and dates. It doesn't tell you what it felt like to be a little boy.  The following year's census gives us one of those cold little facts that suddenly feels anything but cold: Dad and his father were listed as boarders.

What was that like for an eight-year-old boy who had just lost his mother?  She died in childbirth and baby William was adopted into another family and disappeared from their everyday lives (although, wonderfully, he reconnected with the family many years later).

My mother's childhood wasn't exactly Leave It to Beaver, either.  She was one of eleven children (born in 1927) growing up in Columbus, Ohio. Her father was an alcoholic. On payday and  there was money to be had, Grandma sometimes sent one of the younger children down to the bar to get some of it from him before he drank it all. (He eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver).
And Mom carried another reminder of childhood right on her face. When she was about two years old, she put the hot end of an electrical iron cord in her mouth. It left her with a terrible scar near her mouth. I imagine that scar bothered her far more than it ever bothered my father.

Because after the war, Dad met her at a tiny diner enjoying a malted with her sister.  And he thought she was beautiful.

Of all the dates and names and census records in a 108-page family genealogy someone prepared for me years ago, that may be the piece of family history that matters most to me.

Two people came out of childhoods that were hard in ways their own children would never fully understand. One lost his mother when he was eight. One grew up in a house with ten siblings and an alcoholic father. Neither came from anything resembling the comfortable, protected childhoods we hope to give children today.

Yet somehow they got from there to me.

I can trace one branch of my family back to Germany and another to England. There are immigrants, farmers, soldiers, coal-country families and even a Revolutionary War captain tucked into those 108 pages.
That's interesting.

But I'm beginning to think family history isn't really about seeing how far backward we can go.  It's about going back just far enough to understand the people we actually knew.

I knew Mom and Dad.

I'm only now beginning to understand the children they once were.

Dad and Me and Mom 1953

Things That Quietly Disappeared

Nobody held a retirement party for the Rolodex.

There was no farewell ceremony for the telephone book. No final salute to the Fotomat, the road atlas or the newspaper TV listings.

One day these things were simply part of everyday life. Then, without our noticing, they weren't.

Think about it. When was the last time you used an address book? Called 411? Looked up a word in a dictionary? Wrote a check at the grocery store? Sent a postcard? Used a pay phone?

We once carried maps in the glove compartment and stopped at gas stations to ask directions. We clipped coupons with scissors, looked up movie times in the newspaper and called theaters to hear a recorded voice list the showtimes.

We had alarm clocks, wristwatches, wall calendars and recipe boxes filled with handwritten index cards. Pencils that needed sharpening. Shoe horns. Handkerchiefs. Bank deposit slips. Carbon paper. Typewriter correction fluid.

We took pictures with cameras, dropped the film off for developing and waited DAYS to find out we'd had our thumb over the lens.

And we knew phone numbers.

Lots of them.

I knew the numbers of family, friends, work, doctors and probably a favorite restaurant or two. Today, once I put someone in Contacts, I apparently give my brain permission to erase the number forever.

I've actually had several dreams in which there's an emergency and I need to call my late husband from a landline—but I can't remember his phone number.  Why would I? He was No. 1 in my Favorites.

Apparently some little corner of my brain remains concerned that someday I'll be stranded beside a perfectly functional telephone with absolutely nobody I can call.

We didn't decide to stop memorizing phone numbers. Nobody announced that this particular life skill was being discontinued. We just stopped needing it.

That's how most of these things disappeared.

The Sears catalog. Traveler's checks. Paper airline tickets. Library card catalogs. VCRs and “Be Kind, Rewind.” Cassette tapes repaired with a pencil. Photo albums. Slide projectors. Busy signals. Long-distance rates. Calling the operator. Writing down a phone message on the pad beside the kitchen telephone.

And remember when television actually ended for the night?

Some disappearances I don't mourn at all. Ashtrays everywhere? Good riddance. Carbon copies? Fine. And I have absolutely no desire to unfold a road map across the steering wheel while trying to figure out whether I missed Highway 26.

But I do wonder what we're losing along with all that convenience.

We don't have to remember phone numbers. We don't have to remember directions. We don't even have to remember what we need at the grocery store if we put it in an app.

Maybe that's progress.

Still, I kind of miss the satisfaction of knowing exactly how to get somewhere, exactly what someone's phone number was—and exactly where to find the bent paperclip in the junk drawer.

Of course, the junk drawer hasn't quietly disappeared.

Some things are apparently forever.

So many disappearances

Alarm clocks — clock radios with glowing red numbers.

Wall calendars — still around, but no longer running everyone's life.

Address books — actual little books with crossed-out addresses and people moved from Smith, Mary to Jones, Mary.

Checkbooks — and balancing one!

Paper grocery lists tucked into a purse.

Handwritten letters and thank-you notes.

Postcards from vacations.

Encyclopedias — an entire shelf of information that was already out of date by the time you finished paying for it.

Dictionaries and thesauruses sitting beside the desk.

Yellow Pages — and letting your fingers do the walking.

Telephone booths/pay phones.

Calling 411.

Calling the operator.

Busy signals. Kids may never experience the special irritation of knowing someone was talking on the phone for THREE HOURS.

Long-distance rates — waiting until evenings or Sundays to call.

Collect calls - well maybe prison calls

Telephone extension cords long enough to roam half the house.

Writing down phone messages on a pad beside the telephone.

VCRs and “Be Kind, Rewind.”

TV antennas and somebody standing there saying, “STOP! Right there!”

Getting up to change the TV channel.

TV test patterns/sign-offs — television actually ended for the night.

Saturday morning cartoons because you couldn't watch them whenever you wanted.

The Sears catalog.

Mail-order forms where you wrote the item number, size, color and quantity and mailed it with a check.

Catalog shopping by telephone.

Travel agents for ordinary vacations.

Traveler's checks.

Paper airline tickets.

Boarding passes you guarded with your life.

Road atlases and AAA TripTiks.

Stopping at a gas station to ask for directions.

Gas-station attendants checking your oil and cleaning the windshield. (Although Oregon held onto attendants much longer than most!)

Disposable cameras.

Film canisters. And saving them because they were useful little containers!

Photo albums with actual prints.

Slide projectors and vacation slides.

One-hour photo developing.

Typewriters and correction fluid.

Carbon copies.

Fax machines.

Floppy disks.

CD towers/racks.

Cassette tapes—and fixing one with a pencil!

Newspaper classified ads.

Newspaper movie listings.

Clipping coupons with scissors.

Recipe boxes filled with handwritten index cards.

Paper menus—QR codes haven't completely won, thank goodness.

Matches from restaurants.

Ashtrays everywhere. An excellent disappearance!

Hat-check rooms.

Handkerchiefs.

Aprons for everyday cooking.

Shoe horns and those little shoe-polishing kits.

Shoe repair shops—not gone, but much harder to find.

Pencils that needed sharpening and the wall-mounted crank sharpener.

Library card catalogs.

Overdue library stamps inside the book.

Writing checks at the grocery store while twelve people waited behind you.

Bank passbooks.

Deposit slips.

Getting a paycheck that was an actual check.

Keys! Slowly disappearing—cars, hotel rooms, houses...

Doorbells that just rang instead of recording you, identifying you and notifying three phones.

Printed instruction manuals. Now apparently we're expected to scan a QR code while lying upside down underneath the dishwasher.